Have you ever wondered how the world works? Not, like, what it’s like to be an adult, or how to handle money, or the unspoken rules of the dating world and career networking. I mean in a broader sense. And more than just, if you dissect a frog and figure out its organs. Like, on a baseline, how does the universe and the world work? What mechanisms hold it up?

Curious people want to know how things work. Scientists want to understand how animals behave. Architects want to understand what will hold up a building versus what will make it collapse. Psychologists want to know how the brain works, to better understand why we are the way we are (we still don’t know much!).

Consider back in the day, though. I am talking about the day. Greece, 560ish BCE. Picture it! You’ve got lots of guys wondering, for the first time on a grand scale, how the world around them works. They basically invent science and philosophy, for those who question things. These people don’t want to just unblinkingly accept that the way natural phenomena happen is because of the gods. They don’t want to accept that the reason a storm occurs, for instance, is because Zeus got a little feisty.

As a result, you have schools of people who consider very deeply how things work, the true reason for the way they are. Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 540-?) was one such person. His views of the world and how it works are set out for us in one fragment of his broader works, apparently the preface.

What the Flux?: Constant Flow, Constant Change

Heraclitus, known for being a curmudgeon and general misanthrope, had one way of looking at the broader world. He wanted to know this: what is the law of the universe? How does it work? What does it do? And how do we understand it?

For Heraclitus, the way of understanding the universe around us relies on its constant change, its state of flux. What do we mean when we say flux? Imagine a river that you step into. It’s wet and running, constantly, constantly. When you step into it, then come out of it, it’s not the same river as it was before you did, because your presence interrupted the flow of water, changed its course, even on a small level.

When you are gone, it returns to what it was doing as if you had never been there, but it is ontologically different nonetheless, yet not. It has changed but remains the same in its change. The world around us is like this; it both is and isn’t at the same time. Life happens, but so does death. They are kind of false dichotomies, because they are all part of the mechanism of existence.

Heraclitus best illustrates this thus:

Angry Universe?: Nah, Bruh, It’s Just Changing

There is something scary to the idea of a universe that gets set on fire and stamped out all the time, and even maybe the idea that you have changed a river by walking into it. But for Heraclitus, perhaps, this is not meant to be scary. It is simply the way things work. Because, while these processes happen, back and forth, left and right, they are all part of one overarching system, and not as opposed to each other as we would think.

As such, we can take death with as much equanimity as we take life, we can accept change without fear, without frustration. It’s the nature of the beast, so to speak.The logos, or overarching mechanism that takes care of everything that goes on in the universe, has got us covered. To quote Heraclitus again, “Changing, it rests” (via our boy Plotinus). 

It may seem a little like trolling when we hear that this is and isn’t but both the is and isn’t are. Like, make up your mind. How is burning and extinguishing the same thing? How are the night and the day the same? For Heraclitus, they are not necessarily the same, but rather part of the same processes. And if you think about it, when we think of the sun rising during the day and setting for night, it’s a streamlined process, and we know that the moon is illuminated by the sun at night, to greater or lesser extent.

Day and night, therefore, are part of a bigger thing, even though they seem like opposites. Knowing this, we can see supposed strife in a more relaxed way, can see, even, that things we think are opposing or dichotomies are not, not in the grand scheme of things. But the nature of the universe is that, like me on caffeine, it refuses (and can’t) sit still. That is just how it works. Everything is one.

Heraclitus the Jerk: Bonus Thoughts on People and How Smart He Is

Since we only have fragments to offer, let’s have some bonus content on Heraclitus: his jerk side. Unsurprisingly, philosophers like Nietzsche, who famously titled one of his chapters of Ecce Homo “Why I Am So Wise” and another “Why I Am So Clever,” love them some Heraclitus. Why? Let’s have a look.

Heraclitus, at least through what we have left, really loved to throw some shade at other big names, and also at humanity in general. Much like an old man living today, he liked to say how most people don’t have common sense, how they can learn a lot but not really know things, and how the masses are lame.

Like any good edgelord, Heraclitus sniped at people who had a lot of book learning, “polymathy,” remarking that book learning isn’t going to get you “insight” if you don’t have the wits to attain it. You can, he asserted, be super educated but also super dumb. I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen this happen a lot in observing people with PhDs try to do simple things. Ahem.

For Heraclitus, too, knowledge was not easy to come by. Like many other Greek philosophers of the time, Heraclitus thought that true knowledge was removed from people, that they had to pay attention to access it. In that way, this true knowledge, also logos, is obscured by most people who are not inclined to think deeply about the world around them. It’s there, but you’re too dimwitted to see it.

Naturally, this dim view of humanity appeals to later philosophers who also don’t think people are that great. I can’t blame them, as I have my days where I do wonder. However, you can’t live in that state and I would suggest that, just as Heraclitus says elsewhere, everything, though one, changes. So too may your views on your fellow human beings over time.

Again, I’d like to express thanks to my working text, A Presocratics Reader published by Hackett. The citations come from here. Mine is the First Edition.

A Message from Markus: Can You Paint an Idea?

We commissioned a painting for this series. It's by my mother-in-law, Gabriele Lauschke, and the idea came from a fairly simple question I asked her over dinner: could an idea be painted? Not a place. Not an object. An idea.

Half the Painting, Finally Explained

Back in part one, we showed you a canvas split in two and told you nothing about which half was which. Here's the left side.

That's Heraclitus's half. The river runs straight down the canvas, and the whole scene around it is deliberately caught in motion, ships mid-sail, a hillside village never quite settling into fixed geometry, even the pottery in the foreground sits at odd angles like it's mid-slide. Nothing in that half is arranged to look permanent. That's the point. For Heraclitus, permanence was never real to begin with, only the appearance of it, held up by a mechanism that never stops running underneath.

The other half remains a mystery for now. That's part three.